Research Overview

Linguistics at UCSC is focused, theoretically ecumenical, and dedicated to research interaction among faculty and students. One long-standing commitment of the department is to the descriptive and theoretical import of whole-language investigation. A more recent goal has been the development of novel experimental paradigms.

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Research in phonetics and phonology at UCSC combines formal and experimental approaches to address a wide range of questions about linguistic representation, perception and phonology, category formation, and other topics. Learn more >>

The core goal of research by the syntax and morphology group at UCSC is a precise theory of the structure of sentences and words. We focus on core questions in syntactic and morphological theory and their interaction with other aspects of language ability: semantics, prosody, and real-time production and comprehension. Learn more >>

Common to work in semantics and pragmatics at UCSC is a formal approach to theoretically relevant problems grounded in detailed investigation of empirical data coming from a variety of languages. A thread uniting the research of the faculty and students here is attention to both semantic and pragmatic factors with particular emphasis on understanding language in context. Learn more >>

The recently expanded laboratory infrastructure in the Department of Linguistics at UCSC supports our vision for broadening the ways in which we answer questions about language and the mind. From broad-scale experiments on the web, to the creation of novel corpora, to state-of-the-art ultrasound and eye-tracking studies, researchers at UCSC now have a diverse toolkit with which to understand the mental mechanisms that enable language. Learn more >>